as published in the May '25 issue of Brainstatic Flange, Xeroxed in a basement off Trask Street, distributed in VHS sleeves at local swap meets
By Buzz Drainpipe (as dictated through a contact mic taped to a laundromat dryer)
So here we are again: the peanut gallery prophets. The psychonauts with parole officers. The book-huffers scanning moldy page margins for signs from Saturn. You ever plug Molloy into a Peavey Rage 158 and just let it squeal? That’s where we’re broadcasting from. No treble. Just doom-squelched mids and a conspiracy of metaphors.
Today’s séance: Daniel Pinchbeck, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin, R.D. Laing. The Four Feedback Riders of the Inner Collapse. Let’s roll tape.
DANIEL PINCHBECK: THE NEW AGE PARANOID IN A USED SPACESUIT
Pinchbeck’s the acid test after the Kool-Aid’s gone flat. The Terrence McKenna retweet that started believing itself. He parachutes into the rave scene of apocalypse culture armed with Mayan calendars and ayahuasca burps. He wants a transformation, but it’s branded and optional. He’s the Cosmic Bachelor, always looking for meaning but afraid to marry any of it.
Plug him through the Rage 158 and you get late-night AM static with jungle beats bleeding in from the edges. He's a DMT tourist in a haunted mall food court—recommending “The Spirit Molecule” between bites of Panda Express.
MARSHALL McLUHAN: THE SHAMAN IN A SUIT
McLuhan is what happens when a Jesuit professor drinks too much reel-to-reel tape hiss and starts prophesying through broken television tubes. “The medium is the massage”—yeah, baby. He got zapped and never quite blinked again.
Through the Peavey? Pure power hum, like a dead channel looping elevator music from the fourth dimension. He didn’t warn us. He just announced us—said “YOU ARE HERE” while pointing at a diagram that had already eaten itself. The internet was his fever dream. Meme-culture? His illegitimate child. He’s the ghost in every TikTok filter whispering: you’re not watching this—this is watching you.
WALTER BENJAMIN: THE FLÂNEUR AT THE END OF TIME
Our man Walter walked the arcade like a divining rod, smoking metaphors and mourning aura. He saw capitalism morph into hallucination. And that’s before TV.
His Angel of History is now a YouTube thumbnail, hovering in horror while reaction videos explode behind it. Benjamin knew: reproduction isn’t just mechanical—it’s demonic. Every copy is a séance. Every share is a curse. Play him through the Peavey and you get reversed cathedral bells and the distant sound of a PowerPoint presentation about the apocalypse.
He tried to escape through the border. The future caught him first.
R.D. LAING: THE SHRINK WHO SAW THROUGH THE WALL
Laing stood in the asylum hallway with a notebook and a grin, knowing full well the building was just a reflection of the outside world’s schizophrenia. He didn’t treat madness—he documented it like an ethnographer in a collapsing soul.
You run The Divided Self through the Peavey, and it howls like a dog locked in a closet full of mirrors. Laing’s not trying to fix you. He’s just the guy who says “You’re not crazy. You’re just accurately responding to a psychotic civilization.” Take two truths and call him in the morning.
He was a punk before punk. And he played sitar on a few sessions, probably.
POST-SCRIPT IN OVERDRIVE
So what happens when you feed all four through the same input jack, no EQ, just pure jack-to-amp injection?
You get the mono-drone of Modernity Unmasked.
You get zines folded like prayer flags, scattered through mail slots by kids who never bought into the Simulation Upgrade.
You get channel 99—the one that only shows your reflection, flickering back at you in 480i despair.
This is your invitation:
String up your mind like old guitar cable.
Put a dead battery in the pedal.
Scream like Beckett in a hardware store.
And listen closely:
There are voices in the fuzz.
Print run: 37 copies. One was eaten by a dog. Another was left on a bus seat and started a cult.
Reissues may be found on microcassette or as spoken-word via CB radio after midnight.
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